Movies about love aren't exactly a new phenomenon: cinema was practically invented
to explore the inner mysteries of the human heart. These stories typically take the form of light comedy or pat drama
or, every now and again, arbitrary tragedy (these movies are mostly
European). But a recent wave of indie filmmakers have begun to
reinvent the romance by exploring love's most overlooked
element: how truly painful
it can be.

This
week's Double Feature pairs two films that dare to present love as
complicated, mysterious and ultimately wonderful — as we all know it
to be: Shane Carruth's Upstream
Color(2013)
and Andrew Haigh's Weekend(2011).

Upstream
Color — a below-the-radar masterpiece if there ever was one — is nearly
impossible to summarize without ruining the series of surprises that
makes the film so powerful, but here goes!
An uptight, white collar woman named Kris (You're
Next's
Amy Seimetz) is mugged and robbed by a mysterious man with highly
bizarre methods. Then, while trying to get her life back together, Kris finds herself mysteriously bonded to a
stranger named Jeff (played by the film's writer/director Shane
Carruth) who'd undergone a nearly identical trauma.

Blue
grubs, secret laboratories, frightened farm animals, rare orchids,
uncannily memorized passages from Walden: all factor into the
mystery surrounding what happened to these wounded people and how it will affect their tenuous friendship and blossoming romance. But is their love a
genuine connection between soulmates, or is it something owed to
outside forces? Needless to say, Upstream Color doesn't shy
away from love's most profound mysteries. Anyone familiar with
Carruth's previous film, the mind-bending sci-fi thriller Primer,
should appreciate the aggressively cryptic imagery he uses to
illustrate the sheer terror of being in love.

Weekend
is another small film made for a limited audience, but its immediate impact as a critical success had more to do with the
fact that there simply hadn't ever been a gay romance this
well-observed before. Writer/director Andrew Haigh is the
man behind the very zeitgeisty new series Looking
and there's a definite stylistic through-line. Perhaps unfairly pigeonholed as mumblecore, Weekend
tells the story of two days in the life of strangers who become much
more than that. Russell (Downton
Abbey's
Tom Cullen) is a slightly buttoned-down wallflower uncomfortable with
gay culture's bigger stereotypes. His chance encounter with the
much more free-spirited Glen (Chris New) leads to a weekend of
philosophizing, pot-smoking, and intimacy — both sexual and otherwise.

Owing
much to slow-burning (and shockingly affecting) talk-a-thons like
Before Sunrise, Weekend presents two very
real, very identifiable characters and makes us care deeply about
their burgeoning relationship. When a nasty argument threatens to
derail everything, it actually hurts to watch. And then in the
end when — oh, I can't say what happens, but it's somehow both
quietly devastating and wonderful in ways you may not expect.

Let's be real: This time of year is just so love-ridden.
But as much as we can all get behind a light romantic comedy, it's films like Upstream Color and Weekend that properly illustrate how fraught and intense it can be to give one's heart to another. That these movies embrace angst and confusion almost to the degree of unbearability isn't a knock against the more traditional light romance genre; it's an endorsement. Despite the horror and sadness and inherent mysteries involved, both films suggest that love is simply worth it.